4 02 TRANSMISSION 



wonderful series of which it is itself but a part, and of whose 

 beginning and end it is alike ignorant. 



The instinct to suck cannot be conceived as founded on habit, 

 because sucking is not a life habit with any individual. It is 

 practiced but a brief season after birth, and then abandoned, 

 leaving no trace or even impulse behind. 



It is difficult for us to dissociate these complicated acts from 

 the idea of intelligent control. Yet many of them are performed 

 by plants, in which there is not so much as the beginnings of a 

 nervous system, the impulse traveling from cell to cell, as it is 

 entirely capable of doing in animal tissue, but at a rate easily 

 overtaken by nerve transmission, whenever the latter is superim- 

 posed by the will or otherwise. 



Again, we must consider the exceedingly complicated nature 

 and serial order of the vital processes generally. Most of these 

 processes, it is true, aside from copulation, the laying of the egg, 

 and the care of the young, are carried on inside the body, and 

 therefore out of sight of the observer. If we could by some 

 mental microscope see not only the pulsation of the heart, the 

 movements of the stomach and intestines, and the discharge of 

 accumulated secretions, but also the internal acts of secretion 

 going on within the various glands of the body, with the associated 

 protoplasmic motion and cell division, actively accompanied by 

 the careful division of the chromosomes into exactly equal por- 

 tions qualitatively as well as quantitatively if we could see 

 all this as we see external instinctive acts, we should be led to 

 marvel at the mystery and the complication of vital activity in 

 general. We should involuntarily seek a basis of intelligent con- 

 trol within the organism, whereas we know that the proper 

 place to seek causation is outside the creature in the forces 

 that shaped its development and in the higher power that en- 

 dowed it all with life, whose characteristic act is motion and 

 appropriation of new material. We are, therefore, not to be 

 misled by the complexity of acts having the appearance of 

 intelligence. 



We have been led to project intelligence too far down the 

 scale. It may, if present, take hold of and overrule most (not all) 

 instinctive acts, but the vast majority of organic activities go on 



